(The Archbishop spoke in an exclusive interview with the Editor of The Muslim News, Ahmed J Versi. The interview

focused largely on the general lack of ethical principles in today’s secular society, emphasizing the need to

re-discover the “sense of being responsible to each other and for each other”).

The Archbishop of Canterbury has
praised Muslims for raising the profile of religion and
ethical challenges in society. “I think Islam has made a
very significant contribution to getting a debate about
religion into public life,” Dr Rowan Williams said. “And
I think it’s very right that we should have these
debates and discussions between Muslims and Christians
and others in public,” he said.

The Archbishop was speaking in an exclusive interview
with the Editor of The Muslim News, Ahmed J Versi. The
interview focused largely on the general lack of ethical
principles in today’s secular society, emphasizing the
need to re-discover the “sense of responsible to each
other and for each other.”

“The idea that what’s good for me and what’s good for
you belongs together. Both Muslims and Christians have a
very strong sense of God’s will being done in community,
when we really follow the needs of the community and
work for one another on that in the will of God.”

On the current economic crisis, Dr Williams said it was
due to a number of factors and that he did not want to
pin the blame on the bankers. “I would blame all of us
for having repeatedly voted for governments since the
1980’s that have pushed for growth that doesn’t always
deal with poverty,” he said. “If I want to narrow it
down, one of the problems in the last round of crisis is
that we have lost any sense of trust and relationship
and transactions of financial speculators in recent
years have gone so far away from any face to face
relationships, any real calculation of whether somebody
is credit worthy that they have become abstract. So that
sense of personal responsibility to one another has been
lost, and behind that is the sense of personal
responsibility to God that has been lost.”

Questioned on whether it was because of the kind of
society we live in the sense that there is no faith in
the public domain, the Archbishop said that at the heart
of it, society had “lost the idea that it’s essential to
human beings to have some relationship to God.”

“We can’t really be human unless we have some sort of
relationship with God. And in so much of our culture
that’s just not there these days, so we do pay the price
for it,” he said.

With regard to Muslims being put down for bringing up
faith issues into the public domain, the Archbishop said
it also happened to Christians. “What we all want to say
is that faith is not just what you and I think in our
heads, it’s also about the relations we have in society
and what we hope for in society. If we are not allowed
as religious people to talk and argue about these issues
in public then I think society has become a rather
unfriendly place for religious people and that’s not
helpful change,” he said.

He criticised the policies of those political leaders in
the West who are practicing Christians who failed to
bring about the change. They were unable to “turn around
our society which was being driven by materialism” and
hoped “to see leaders listening specifically to the more
ethical challenges that faith brings.”

Dr Williams acknowledged that the Christian Muslim Forum
does not reach the grassroots. “The conversation of the
elite and intellectuals isn’t in itself going to change
anything. We’ve got to deal with it and complicated
questions, but we have to make good neighbors,” he said.
But he believed grassroots tensions between Muslims and
Christians in this country is “often exaggerated by
politicians and others.” “Keep the presence of religion
in our educational institutions and I think there is a
lot that can be done there,” he said.

Asked about the lack of condemnation of Israel for its
latest slaughter of Palestinians from Christian and
Jewish leaders, Dr Williams said that it is “always
illegal” to kill civilians. “I think Christian leaders
and indeed Jewish leaders were prepared to say in
December and January that killing of civilians was not a
good thing. I don’t think anyone in religious groups
defended that,” he said. His own position was that he
made a statement in which he “condemned all loss of
innocent lives in Gaza and in Israel.” On this, he
acknowledged that that he was sure there was an
imbalance, given the number of Palestinians killed by
Israel. But he said that the “willingness of faith
leaders in this country to work together to provide
assistance to Gaza, was a very important factor there.”

With regard to the recent decision by the Church of
England to diversify its investment in Caterpillar,
which supplies bulldozers to Israel to destroy
Palestinian homes, the Archbishop said the question had
been “is this company producing material that is being
used in an unjust way.”